The New South Wales public transport system uses the Opal smartcard as its payment mechanism. This means their servers store every trip that you make, including the start/end times and locations.
They need this data for billing, so there’s not much we can do about it from a privacy point of view. However you may be interested in getting your own copy of your data for making pretty graphs or other analyses.
I just realised that my previous post on this was 18 months ago. That’s depressing. Well, the situation has mostly stayed the same since then. It’s good that it has not become worse!
This post is a slightly edited version of an email I sent to my local representative about the matter.
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The Australian government is planning to filter the internet to protect children. The idea is to have two tiers of filtering. The first tier is enabled by default for all internet connections and blocks all material considered unsafe for children. Adults will have the option to move to the second tier which is designed to only block illegal material.